Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Bruno Raoult writes:
 > On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
 > > Raymond Wan writes:
 > >
 > >  > I love LaTeX and try to do as much as I can with it.
 > 
 > Am I the only one who cannot write LaTeX here? I tried to make a
 > simple Haiku (3 lines), plus a title, plus my name. It was at the
 > time my wife started to write her book.

You're probably not the only one who can't write LaTeX, but I bet
you're in the minority on this list.

Surely, if you learned computers in this millennium, there are better
(simpler) ways to format programs that look quite nice, such as
markdown and ReStructuredText, and they translate better to the web.
(The print form usually takes the form of a source transformation to
LaTeX, though.)

The main reason for learning LaTeX is writing mathematics (friends
don't let friends read the output of Scientific Word).

The other reason for learning LaTeX is that you actually have an
esthetic sense for a beautiful page, whether there's math on it or
poetry.  Most Word templates look like they were designed by an
accountant in purchasing responsible for saving on paper and ink
costs.  By the way, as always Google is my friend:

  http://homepage3.nifty.com/xymtex/fujitas2/texlatex/tateyoko/haiku.sty

If you need more than you can do nicely with markdown *and* you care
about getting useful diffs, then LaTeX beats both markdown and Word
with a stick until the feathers fly.  It's very easy to format LaTeX
so that you get beautiful diffs and readable source, as well as
beautiful output, because (like C and LISP), TeX rarely considers the
amount of whitespace to significant.  Markdown makes that harder
because many aspects of markdown markup take advantage of "natural"
plain text formatting.  While Word's markup for changes is *ugly*, and
often unintelligible.

I don't know about markdown, but to me ReStructuredText has a "write
once" feel to it.  If *all* you write is text (no tables or figures,
no math), no problem with editing.  But if you have tables, figures,
or math, *editing* ReStructuredText is painstaking (of course if you
use something like Emacs you can program macros to handle a lot of the
annoyances).  And diffs often make no sense because of whitespace
changes.  (Yeah, you can use -w but it's easy to forget, and you
probably don't want it all the time because whitespace is significant
so changes matter.  Annoying!)

Finally, if you are an academic trying to get a paper published,
nowadays many journals require camera-ready copy *and* a specific
format for the bibliography.  It is a massive PITA if you get rejected
and need to submit to a journal with a different style -- unless you
use LaTeX.  Then you can use BibTeX, and change bibliographic styles
with the optional argument to the \usepackage[STYLE]{bibtex} command.
Agreed, most people don't have to deal with this, but if you do it's a
major win, especially if your journal uses one of the 150 or so styles
published on CTAN.  As far as I know there is no such facility at all
for Word, unless you're an advanced Visual Basic programmer.  In
markdown, I suppose you could do it with an Emacs macro though.

 > I even tried some "interface" (lyx). No way it could be useful for
 > someone "normal" (i.e.  not wanting to spend time on what they
 > think useless for their writing).

I am not surprised that you write this.  But there are lots of normal
people who would like to get nice-looking output for documents for
which there is no bundled Word template.

 > I believe it will die with the eldest people here.

Now, *that* is highly unlikely.  There just is no good way to write
math yet that isn't based on TeX.  Word is hopeless.  Clueless people
learn to create passable math with LaTeX *much* faster than they do
with Word in my experience.  Most Word users never do get acceptable
output (well, not by the time they submit their theses, anyway).
Maxima/Maple/Mathematica aren't too bad, but they write "stupid"
LaTeX, which is hard to edit for beauty (as opposed to mathematical
correctness).

Eventually Mathematica will probably get smart enough to remember your
substitutions and create TeX macros for that notation, but until then
people who program, who care about beautiful programs and beautiful
prose, and who at least occasionally write math, will continue to use
LaTeX.

 > And when they ask for help to correct their document, you surely
 > won't translate it first to a "magical format reserved to their
 > beloved son/daughter".

Well, my parents are both dead now, but I did exactly that on a few
occasions where they cared about high-quality output.  Word *really*
sucked back then, of course (this was the post-WordStar era when
WordPerfect ruled).

 > No writer uses it. They could prefer hand writing, or old typing
 > machine, or word/libre/openoffice/google

Of course writers don't.  They never were responsible for typesetting,
and most are perfectly happy to keep it that way.  They get paid for
the words, and the publisher pays someone else to make them pretty.

 > Saying "I love LaTeX" is same as "I love chess". Dead game.

Funny ... sometime this week Japanese television is doing a
retrospective on Bobby Fischer ... and the Japanese don't even play
that kind of chess (they have Japanese chess, called "shogi").  And
Sugishita Ukio plays (Western) chess!  Quite well, it seems.

 > Sorry, this may be seen as a troll, but is not: If your parents and
 > children don't care, they cannot all be wrong.  The guy in middle
 > is wrong.

The Law of the Excluded Middle doesn't apply to taste.  If you have a
taste for beauty in mathematics, you use LaTeX.  If you don't, you
probably don't need it, although IMO the documents of people who use
LaTeX are more beautiful and more readable than documents produced by
people who don't.